42 U.S.C. § 204 — Commissioned Corps and Ready Reserve Corps

(a) Establishment (1) The Public Health Service (called "the Service") has a commissioned Regular Corps, and — for use during public health or national emergencies — a Ready Reserve Corps. (2) Every commissioned officer must be a U.S. citizen. They are appointed without regard to normal civil-service hiring rules, and paid without regard to the old 1923 Classification Act. (3) The President appoints commissioned officers in both the Ready Reserve Corps and the Regular Corps. (4) The Surgeon General can call Ready Reserve Corps officers to active duty at any time, including for training. (5) The Service can appoint warrant officers to support its health programs. For purposes of this chapter and title 37, a warrant officer counts as a commissioned officer in the Commissioned Corps. (b) Assimilating Reserve Corps officers into the Regular Corps As of March 23, 2010, everyone who was classified as a Reserve Corps officer under the old version of this section, and who was on active duty, automatically became a Regular Corps officer instead. (c) Purpose and use of Ready Reserve Corps (1) The Ready Reserve Corps exists so extra Commissioned Corps personnel are available on short notice — similar to a military reserve — to help the Regular Corps handle both everyday public health work and emergency response during public health or national emergencies. (2) Consistent with that purpose, the Ready Reserve Corps must: take part in routine training; be ready for mandatory call-ups during national emergencies and public health crises; be available to fill critical positions left open when Regular Corps members are deployed, and to deploy themselves to public health emergencies at home or abroad; and be available to serve in isolated, hardship, or medically underserved communities to improve access to health care. (3) Anywhere else in federal law, a reference to the "Reserve Corps" or the "reserve" of the Public Health Service now means the Ready Reserve Corps — except in subsection (b) above. (d) Funding Congress authorized $5,000,000 per year, for fiscal years 2010 through 2014, for recruiting and training Commissioned Corps members, and $12,500,000 per year for those same years for the Ready Reserve Corps.